Book excerpt: British artist Clare Woods is internationally regarded as one of the most significant painters working today. Her paintings and works on paper are found in important public and private collections around the world, and she has produced many highprofile public commissions in the UK and Europe. Her highly colouristic paintings in oil or gloss paint on aluminium of strange, dark landscapes and anthropomorphic forms hover somewhere between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. This beautifully designed and illustrated volume is the first monograph on Woods' art. It presents all the major works from her career to date, from small-scale intimate paintings and prints to ambitious large-scale architectural projects. The dynamic layout of the book, with a varied mix of close-up detail and installation shots, gives the reader a strong sense of the diverse scale and immersive, push-pull nature of the paintings. Five prominent writers consider various aspects of her practice, including her use of photographic source material; her engagement with the traditions of landscape and figurative art; her relationship with artistic forebears, such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; the context of painting practice today and twenty-firstcentury culture; and the connections between her life and work.